r that under
the circumstances they should ever have been made) that the Polish
volunteers were badly armed and illy managed--possibly they might have
been better even in a partisan war. But as to the want of skill in the
officers, including such as Skarzynski, Bosak, Padlewski, we wonder that
the writer or his friend F. could not succeed in making their talents
known and valued, and become at least leaders among the blind. Of course
he had to contend with cross-eyed jealousy. Yet if, as a foreigner, and
a learned one too, he was, as he himself informs us, intimately admitted
into various chateaux, it seems almost impossible he should have had no
opportunity to become major, colonel, or even general, since it is well
known, and every foreigner will bear witness to the fact, that in these
_chateaux_ there has always been too much attention and too great
preference shown to foreigners--a preference, however, in which the
lower classes do not participate.

As to the easy chateau life led in Galicia, as in Russia, we have a
remark to offer. In a country exposed during five or six centuries to
incessant struggle against Asiatic craving for European allurements, or,
to speak more definitely, after ninety-four Mongolian incursions, in
which twenty millions of Polish people were carried off, and thousands
of towns, bourgs, and villages were destroyed; after numberless wars,
plunders, and devastations by Jazygs, Turks, Muscovites, Crusaders,
Wallachians, Transylvanians, Swedes, Brandenburgians, etc., etc.; after
a hundred years of the so-called _paternal_ spoliation of Russia,
Prussia, and Austria--there could have been no opportunity, even under
Graff Pouilly de Mensdorf, to build _comfortable_ chateaux on the
mouldering ruins, or for the accumulation of means for an easy life
under the oppressions of an Austrian tariff, which exacted that goods
manufactured in Lemberg should be sent for inspection to the Vienna
custom house before being exposed to sale. There are, however, a few
very splendid chateaux, like oases in the Desert of Sahara; they can be
counted readily on one's fingers; among them few patriots; no
conspirator, much less an insurgent or crippled invalid, ever called to
ask hospitality.

The calumny so often repeated, so urgently insisted upon, that the aim
of the Polish insurrection was inconsistent, foolish, and wicked, might
not perhaps astonish the reader more than the report of the want of zeal
and faith in t